Rugged individualism is great for legendary heroes, but does it really shape a society that can endure for the long term? A massive social transformation is underway, driven by technology; it requires and is pushing us toward a cooperative culture. Our American competitive, individualistic culture is outmoded and increasingly ineffective. This book presents a new model of cooperation for building a cooperative American and worldwide society.

About the Author

Gordon E. Moss is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Eastern Michigan University. With a PhD in Sociology / Medical Sociology from SUNY Buffalo, Dr. Moss has taught at the University of Maine–Orono (1966–1968) and Eastern Michigan (1971–1996).

Dr. Moss has conducted NIH funded research on the Type A behavior pattern; his research specialty is social stress and disease. His book Illness, Immunity and Social Interaction was published in 1973. He also has published a number of articles on social stress and sociological theory in scientific journals and edited collections.

About the research that led to this book, Dr. Moss says,

One result of my research was the discovery that Type A behavior was a product of our American competitive and individualistic sociocultural patterns. Further examination revealed that much, if not most, of the social stress Americans experience is generated by our competitive individualistic culture. The permanent “cure” for a great deal of our social stress is the adoption of cooperation in place of competitive individualism. The lack of adequate conceptualizations and measures blocked effective cooperation research and organizational development. This led me into years of study and research to produce a viable model of cooperation for our times and our complex organizations and societies. This book is one result of that work; it is an application of my applied theoretical expertise to the problem of creating a cooperative society in the United States.

About the Book

True cooperation is a stranger in America. The author, an expert on medical sociology, has conducted research on social stress and cooperative solutions, only to find that we call many things cooperation which are not. This includes mutual aid in...

True cooperation is a stranger in America. The author, an expert on medical sociology, has conducted research on social stress and cooperative solutions, only to find that we call many things cooperation which are not. This includes mutual aid in pursuit of shared individual goals, democratic decision making, equal sharing, and compromising.

True cooperation is a cultural pattern used to organize cooperative social systems. Participants are group centered and work to achieve group goals. True cooperation produces rapidly adapting information processing social systems that benefit all of the participants. These cooperative organizations and societies become our primary, and very effective, adaptive tools for survival. This book shows what true cooperation is and how to do it, while also showing how competition and individualism prevent us from truly cooperating and creating a cooperative American (and worldwide) society.

This book fills a huge gap in our literature on and understanding of “cooperation.” As such it is of great value to libraries, organizations, universities, a variety of specialties and professions, and concerned individuals.

The book is written at a more academic level because the material cannot be simplified further without loss of insights and information. It is a “friendly” academic level with examples and explanations while a variety of more academic issues and analyses are excluded.

When I tell friends and colleagues what a cooperative America would look like, they generally say, “We can’t get the’ah from he’ah”: It would be wonderful, but it “ain’t gonna happen.” It does sometimes seem impossible to get “the’ah” from our current society that is pretty much the opposite of cooperative. The peace, harmony, and abundance of cooperation seem an unrealistic utopian dream. While these skeptics are correct that you can’t produce a cooperative society out of the self-centered individualism and adversarial competition that underpin our current American society, it is possible to create within us the seeds of a new cooperative society and nurture it until it becomes our new way of life.

Our competitive individualistic American society is giving us exactly what it is designed to give us. If we don’t like it—as many of us clearly do not—we must change the design of our society. Trying to get our society to be something different from what it is, such as more cooperative, by pushing and twisting it this way and that is as frustrating as it is futile…. If we truly want a cooperative society, we have to design one. We have to build a cooperative culture and abandon our competitive individualistic culture, which cannot produce a cooperative society.

True cooperation will require Americans to step “out of the box,” as we like to say, into a different world. It will be an experience similar to some of our fantasies where the characters step from our current world into a different one, such as Narnia through the back of the wardrobe. We will discover that life in the new world of cooperation is easy, engaging, and delightful. We will be shocked to see how hard our struggles with our old world are by comparison.

…

Cooperation is necessary for us to eliminate our maladaptive cultural habits that threaten our survival as a species. Cooperation is necessary for us to develop and enjoy the exciting high technology lifestyle, astounding explosion of information, and world-wide cultural community that are spreading over our planet. Cooperation is the gateway to the next level of human social evolution. It will be marvelous, and it is much easier to create than we imagine. Yes, we can “get the’ah from he’ah”.

One cannot emphasize too strongly the hard work, dedication to research, and expertise that the author exhibits in this discussion.

In approximately 300 pages, sociologist Gordon Moss takes the reader on a virtual tour de force of the concept of cooperation, its correct and erroneous usages, human and nonhuman experiences with it, future possibilities and potential obstacles to its incorporation as a leading principle in human culture, and more—much more. Examples are drawn widely and analyzed carefully in support of Moss’s argument that humanity is now undergoing a profound evolutionary transformation that will eventuate in a radically different kind of social order from anything that has preceded it—although adumbrations of its nature can be found throughout history and in virtually every culture. Included among these examples are the observations of sociobiologist E. O. Wilson on ants and other nonhuman species, the Hutterite communities of South Dakota, the Saturn Corporation, the Sidewinder missile project, and Japanese management principles such as Kaizen.

To provide a meaningful framework for this wide-ranging discussion, Moss establishes two principles: (1) Human culture is always organized around one or more of three core values, individualism, competition, and cooperation. The evolutionary change of which he speaks will, he argues, eliminate the first two principles that prevail today and lead to a social world dominated by the third. (2) Cooperation is inherently a social, collective phenomenon and does not—indeed, by definition, cannot—apply to individual behavior.

The narrative is divided into three unequal sections, the longest of which—the middle section that begins in Chapter 2 with a discussion of Ron Westrum’s work on the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD)—takes the reader through an exhaustive inventory of instances in which individualism, competition, and cooperative behavior have been attempted and the extent to which they have succeeded or failed: systems analysis, social evolution, a history of individualism, including commentary on Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin, and Walt Whitman. One cannot emphasize too strongly the hard work, dedication to research, and expertise that the author exhibits in this discussion.

The shortest section encompasses the “Preface” and the other front matter, including Chapter 1. It is here that we learn about the author’s research on the Type A behavior complex and his discovery that it is a result not of specific social or biological factors but of life itself in the highly individualistic and competitive culture in the United States. It is also in this section that the framework of the main section is presented.

The book’s third and final section contains the author’s speculation on what a truly cooperative society would look like and how we might get from here to there. This discussion is unabashedly utopian, with the author appropriately citing Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward as a model. Here, Moss combines his unquestioned expertise on the phenomenon of cooperation with creative flights of imagination that at times stretch the powers of credibility, but he does so with due honesty and humility. Chapter 17, titled “Goodbye to Our Old Civilization, And Not a Moment Too Soon,” begins with a forecast:'Cooperation will start small and spread gradually throughout our society, probably taking many generations. Two to three hundred years for a complete transformation may be required. As the process unfolds, changes in the structure of society will be gradual but profound. . . . Since we humans have never produced a cooperative society like the one I have been describing, I have to make theoretical assumptions and there will be places where we just won’t know what it will be like until we get there.'(p. 261)

Included among these forecasts are high rates of productivity with minimum work effort, the disappearance of most forms of interpersonal conflict, the disappearance of both capitalism and socialism, and the elimination of professional competitive sports. Because he is careful to stress that this is what a cooperative society might look like and because he wisely places the dawning of this new age far into the future, these forecasts seem more credible than they otherwise might be. But perhaps the most important lesson to take away from Moss’s conclusion—and, indeed, from the entire essay is this:'We now have the means to banish our malaise and its sources and to give ourselves peace. We have the answer; it is the culture of cooperation. . . . How do we get to this wonderful Utopia? It’s no longer a mystery, true cooperation is no longer a stranger; the path is clear.' (p. 29)

I’m writing to congratulate you on a fine and challenging book. It had many echoes for me. I studied Pueblo Indians of course, the source of much hopeful writing on cooperative societies and at least one utopia (Ursula Le Guin), where I found they achieved cooperation at a cost: they had to work at it (ref Chris Boehm's work).…Many overlaps of interest. Your potential utopia, though, is based on the best of social science research and is practical in its endeavor, not just wishful thinking.

Do you know the work of Don Beck and the Spiral Dynamics people? The future they envision is much like yours I think. In my language I think the Old Adam is quite capable of your cooperative behavior. It is just that in the over large and over complex (and yes, over-competitive) modern societies these elements must struggle to emerge.

Also I wonder if we have not been conditioned to actually like competitive behavior, however destructive it may be. It is addictive, let's face it.

Might we not find your utopia a bit dull? The problem with all utopias, of course. And would they be Open Societies? (Popper) I think they could be but we have come to suspect attempts at society wide "communalism" that always seem to go wrong and turn nasty. The practical answer lies probably in getting rid of what we both see as "destructive competition" and keeping the fun.

Anyway, a great read, great thinking. How good it would have been to teach a course together with you!